Forced labour, religious persecution and torture are continuing in Chin State, Burma, according to a new report released by Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART) and Norwegian Mission to the East.

The three organisations recently returned from a visit to the Chin peoples in Mizoram State on the India-Burma border, where they heard eye-witness accounts of brutal conditions in the prison camps and continuing reports of forced labour.

According to one witness, prisoners are shackled and forced to work on road construction projects, rubber plantations and tea plantations. In one labour camp, prisoners are yoked like oxen and forced to plough the fields.

Accounts of severe beatings, poor food rations, sleep deprivation and torture were heard by the delegation. According to one person who has visited the labour camps many times, anyone caught trying to escape is subjected to the most grotesque forms of torture. Some have their hands tied behind their backs and are dragged along the ground like "dead animals", while others are burned with bamboo sticks so that they are "slowly roasted". If they scream with pain, "a heated crowbar is used to pierce their flesh until the bone is exposed. It takes two to three days for the victim to die." Food rations are so poor that prisoners sometimes resort to eating pig swill, or even their own faeces.

Health care provision in Chin State is in crisis. There are no Chin doctors, and there is "an acute shortage" of both doctors and medicines. The Chairman of the Chin resistance group, the Chin National Front (CNF), Thomas Thang No, told the delegation: "We predict a humanitarian crisis in Chin State this year." Another Chin said: "Chin State is very poor, and very ignored."

The delegation also heard reports of restrictions on religious freedom. The Chin are ninety per cent Christian, but permission to build new churches or renovate existing churches is almost impossible, and Bibles in the Chin language cannot be printed in Burma. No such restrictions apply to Buddhists.

Baroness Caroline Cox, Chief Executive of HART and Honorary President of CSW, said: "The Chin people are enduring brutal oppression, and feel particularly forgotten by the international community. The evidence we received of gross human rights violations in Chin State is compelling, and the clear unfolding humanitarian crisis presents the world with a challenge. We appeal to the international community, and to the Government of India, to assist the Chin people, and all the peoples of Burma, in their struggle for freedom and democracy, and to provide urgently needed humanitarian assistance to those who are displaced and on the run in the jungles."

CSW's Chief Executive Mervyn Thomas said: "It is clear from reading the report of this visit that the Chin people are suffering enormously. They are facing a regime which is suppressing them on three counts: their ethnicity, politics and faith. In addressing the wider human tragedy in Burma, the international community should provide assistance to the Chin and others on Burma's western borders, who have been ignored for too long."

Notes to editors.

The delegation included representatives from CSW-UK, CSW-Australia, HART and Norwegian Mission to the East.

Burma has been ruled by a military dictatorship since 1962. Elections were held in 1990 and won by the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who remains under house arrest. Over 1,100 prisoners of conscience are in jail in Burma.

The current military regime, known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), is perpetrating gross violations of human rights, particularly against the ethnic nationalities, the Karen, Karenni, Shan, Mon, Chin, Kachin, Arakan and Rohingya. Over one million people are internally displaced, and since 1996 over 2,500 villages have been destroyed in eastern Burma alone. Evidence of widespread, systematic rape, forced labour, forced conscription of child soldiers, use of human minesweepers, torture and killings continues to be reported regularly.

In September, 2005 the international law firm DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary published Threat to the Peace: A Call for the UN Security Council to Act in Burma, commissioned by former Czech President Vaclav Havel and Nobel Laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu. A briefing was held at the UN Security Council in December, 2005. CSW is calling for a full UN Security Council discussion on Burma, leading to a resolution. For a copy of the report see

http://burmacampaign.org.uk/unitednations.php